Search Worlds Without End

Marius don Hellespont and his apprentice, Gerd, are professional looters of battlefields. When they stumble upon the corpse of the King of Scorby and Gerd is killed, Marius is mistaken for the monarch by one of the dead soldiers and is transported down to the Kingdom of the Dead.

Just like the living citizens, the dead need a King -- after all, the King is God's representative, and someone needs to remind God where they are.

And so it comes to pass that Marius is banished to the surface with one message: if he wants to recover his life he must find the dead a King. Which he fully intends to do.

Just as soon as he stops running away.

Find the dead a King, save himself, win the love of his life, live happily ever after. No wonder Marius dos Helles is bored. But now something has stopped the dead from, well, dying.

It's up to Marius, Gerd, and Gerd's not-dead-enough Granny to journey across the continent and put the dead back in the afterlife where they belong.

There are places where the world you know, and the worlds you don't, swap, or merge, or disappear entirely. These are the soft places, the transparent moments. The ghosts of World War One will steal your future. Masons will carve the date of your death before your gaze. Those versions of yourself from every universe there is will meet, and haunt you for the rest of days. You will find no safe footing, and the ice beneath you is cracking... Lee Battersby is one of Australia's fastest rising speculative writing stars, and here, for the first time, are collected twenty-five journeys into the pop-culture melting pot he calls a mind.

Table of Contents:

• Solid Air: An Introduction - essay by Geoffrey Maloney
• Father Muerte & the Theft - (2002)
• Silk - (2004)
• Carrying the God
• Pass the Parcel
• Through the Window Merrilee Dances - (2004)
• Elyse - shortstory by Lee Battersby
• The Divergence Tree - (2002)
• Jaracara's Kiss
• The Hobbyist - (2003)
• Mikal
• Letters to Josie - (2004)
• A Stone to Mark My Passing - (2003)
• Vortle - (2004)
• Ecdysis - (2004)
• A Very Good Lawyer - (2003)
• Goodfellow
• Stalag Hollywood
• Brillig - (2002)
• His Calliope
• Father Renoir's Hands
• Through Soft Air - (2003)
• Dark Ages
• Tales of Nireym - (2004)
• Father Muerte & the Rain - (2004)
• Pater Familias - (2005)